Smartphones are capable enough of measuring atmospheric tension, temperatures and humidity, a novel study advised that the gadgets might one day be able to observe and anticipate weather conditions that cause flash floods.

Researchers mentioned that smartphones can be utilized to predict flash floods as well as other natural calamities. Smartphones can help in forecasting weather conditions.

The sensors in the smartphones are regularly observing the environment that includes gravity, atmospheric pressure, the earth’s magnetic field, humidity, temperatures, sound and light levels and many other things.

Vital atmospheric data is available right now on around 3 to 4 billion smartphones across the world. This information can improve the ability to correctly forecast the weather conditions and other natural disasters that cause so many deaths every year.

How Smartphones can be used to provide real time forecasts?
Study published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, the group placed four smartphones under controlled conditions and examined the data to detect phenomena such as “atmospheric tides” which are identical to ocean tides. The team also scrutinized details from a UK-based software known as WeatherSignal. When the smartphones could provide real-time weather conditions through a feedback loop, the public was in a position to locate atmospheric facts on the “cloud” with the help of a software.

This information would then be processed into real-time forecasts and returned to the end users with a weather prediction or a warning to the people in threat zones, the scientists described. 

Summary of the study
Nobody can stop flash floods from happening, but the smartphone’s data can be used soon to generate accurate forecasts to give back these forecasts to the public on real times basis via their phones. So, the causalities due to floods like Kerala can be stop to a large extent.